However, on occasion, we did make a trip to one of the nearby malls, which was only 45 minutes in a couple of directions. This was a necessary trip to buy concert tickets, as there was no such thing as e-commerce yet, so a Ticketmaster outlet was usually found in a chain record store like Spec's or Disc Jockey or Camelot Music or, confusingly, in a Dillard's department store.
It was on these trips that I would spend hours perusing the bins of one of these stores, looking for something affordable that I wanted to listen to, as CD's at any of these places were regularly priced at around $18. In 1994. And yet the music industry couldn't figure out why Napster was putting it out of business a few years later.
Since I really didn't want to shell out 2 weeks allowance for a Rollins Band album, I would spend most of my time rummaging through the cut-out or discount bins, trying to find some group I recognized that had released relevant material in the last few years. Sure, I could buy the self-titled Trixter album, but even I had some self-respect at 15.
It was during one of these treasure hunts in the summer of 1994 that I struck proverbial gold: a compilation album, featuring music from some bands I loved and some I had at least heard of, for less than half the price of a new album. Not about to let this one get away, I purchased my copy of DGC Rarities, Vol 1., had my Camelot Club Card stamped, and waited anxiously while my Mom and sister tried on clothes before I could go home and listen.
still waiting for Volume 2...
A collection of B-Sides, alternate versions and outtakes of bands on the "alternative" off-shoot of Geffen Records, the album featured tracks from Nirvana, Hole, Sonic Youth, Teenage Fanclub, Beck, Counting Crows, The Posies, the aforementioned (and unknown to me at the time) that dog, and a band I had only heard of weeks before, Weezer.
Though I wasn't super familiar with Teenage Fanclub at the time, I really dug their contribution, "Mad Dog 20/20", an outtake from their recent album Thirteen. The Nirvana track, listed as "Pay to Play", ended up being a bit of a disappointment, as I was expecting a previously-unheard song, but got a demo version of "Stay Away" with alternate lyrics instead. However, track 3 was one of those watershed moments that (CLICHE) changed everything. Weezer's "Jamie" was a 2-track demo recorded for a friend as a class project. The song was, and still is, pure gold, mixing the enormous guitar sound of Weezer's early work with an incredibly memorable melody. This song is just amazing, and still remains one of my 5 favorite Weezer tracks. However, despite seeing them NINE TIMES, I've never gotten a chance to hear the song live.
see?
Sonic Youth added a track fittingly titled "Compilation Blues", Beck contributed "Bogusflow", Hole covered Echo & The Bunnymen and that dog. put forth "Grunge Couple", a tribute to Sonic Youth and Spinal Tap. Having never heard the band before, I was instantly smitten with the raucous, fuzzed-out bass-driven satire of what the press - and the movie Singles - had taken so seriously just a couple years before.
Though the rest of the tracks are fairly decent despite being left off of whatever album they were recorded for, the real gem of the bunch was Counting Crows' "Einstein On the Beach (For an Eggman)", a song that was left off of their debut album August & Everything After for being too cheerful. You know, because it was the mid-90s and that sort of thing was frowned upon. Ironically, this cast-off song became one of the band's biggest hits, hitting #1 on the Billboard Modern Rock charts in the summer of 1994, knocking off Offspring's "Come Out and Play" and succeed by Green Day's "Basket Case", two songs that were more indicative of the taste of the day than a "happy" Counting Crows track.
Despite the relative success of this record, this remains the only volume. While there was certainly plenty of material to put together another album, especially with the success in subsequent years of DGC bands like Elastica, Veruca Salt, Jawbreaker and Girls Against Boys, the rare tracks of these bands had to be hunted down through imports and tape trading for the remainder of the decade, until digital downloads made it easy to complete collections of almost any artist.
Nowadays, b-sides and rarities are easier to find, often offered as bonus tracks on more expensive versions of albums, and older tracks saved for anniversary re-issues every 10 years. For instance, Nirvana's entire catalog was mined in 2004 for With the Lights Out, a 4-disc boxed set of every recorded song and half-finished idea the band, or Kurt, ever put to tape. Like many things, the internet killed the compilation album, save for the massively popular hits sets Now! That's What I Call Music, and even those suffered a mercifully quick death once the iTunes store opened.
And soon enough, Spotify will destroy music commerce as we know it, and young music fans will never know what it was like to stumble upon a gem like DGC Rarities, Vol. 1 (and only).
Whatever.
